In the National Museum of Mexico City, the art collection was divided in two; one floor for the artists with an academic education and one without. And of course the department of the self-taught was more attractive and interesting.
The terms Art Brut and outsider-art are often used interchangeably, but traditionally refer to artists who distinguish themselves by their purity, averse to cultural codes and regulations, often a consequence of a psychological limitation. This is in contrast to artists who were deprived of their authentic spontaneity because of their education!

In Musée Victor Hugo I saw in February a very beautiful, modest exhibition La folie en tête, which featured an overview of drawings and sculptures that were made in psychiatric institutions that experimented for the first time with ‘art therapy’ and that took the patients in them very seriously. The resulting collections were named after the psychiatrists who took the initiative, Prinzhorn and Morgenthaler and are now renowned and priceless.

Outsider-art has become big business. There are collectors, special museums (Dr Guislain in Ghent, LaM in Lille), art-fairs and magazines. How marginalized is outsider art yet? And can we speak of a difference between outsiders and insiders? There is – certainly among artists – a great interest, perhaps a desire for a counterpart of the contemporary artist who profiles himself as ‘cultural entrepreneur’ or ‘artistic researcher’. But it all has something uncomfortable, something double, that label ‘outsider’. However great the appeal is of the collages of Henry Darger, the notation of Wölfli, the dizzying city portraits of Willem van Genk, the tunnels of Ramirez, the closed sheets, the obsessive summaries, constructions and endless repetitions. The awkwardly possessed, can make one jealous.

In the École des Beaux Arts an exhibition has now been compiled with drawings by a seventeenth-century artist, Georges Focus (1644-1708). They are fantastic drawings. All in the same standing format, in the same brown ink, at the bottom a kind of logo; a palette and a small bird. Dense texts in curly banners, complex historical and mythological stories, sometimes burlesque, sometimes violent. All framed drawings were shown double-sided because the back sides were described from top to bottom in the same regular handwriting.
He started as a successful, fairly conventional landscape painter, was allowed to go to Rome in 1666, became a member of the Academy, received commissions, but disappeared from the radar. Later research showed that he spent almost thirty years of his life in an institution, “Petites Maisons,” where he made the biggest share of the drawings shown. So fortunately there has been someone who saw the value of it and took care of it, so that I now stand with my nose at the most wonderful scenes that someone put on paper with a small pen, a threehundred and fifty years ago – completely for himself.

In a series of exemplary exhibits, the newly reopened Musée d’Arts Décoratifs (MAD) in a wing of the Louvre shows the history of (mostly) French design in all areas. From a bedroom from the Middle Ages to the Mondriaan dress by Yves Saint Laurent.

And now an exhibition has been built in the high hall with the all disciplines of the Italian designer Gio Ponti (1891-1979). I only knew him from the Pirelli tower in Milan, and from such a slender dining room chair, but he designed espresso machines, curtains, a cathedral, wallpaper, ceramics, clocks, frescoes, universities, cutlery, hotels and invented in 1928 the design -magazine DOMUS, which still exists.

Here I want to go: the Hotel Parco dei Principi (1960) in Sorrento, where everything is done in the colors blue and white and each room floor is decorated with a different tile pattern.
Incredibly fresh, clear and optimistic.

Behind the closed shutters of this house, 59 Avenue Foch, diagonally opposite the apartment of Maria Callas, a special museum is located.
In the second half of the nineteenth century -Japan was only just opened- Clémence and Adolphe d’Ennery collected objects from China and Japan and had this house built in 1875 to accommodate this collection.
A house tailor-made and unchanged since 1892, when it was decided to leave it in its entirety to the state and then open it to the public. A bit dark and dusty; a dizzying collection of thousands of objects from the Far East in specially made showcases and cabinets. Most are filled with more than 300 netsuke’s, the Japanese gem that served as a knot for the cord around the kimono on which a small bag hung – a kimono has no pockets.

In The hare with amber eyes, by Edmund de Waal, he describes his family history on the basis of the 294 netsuke’s that he inherited, and which was collected in the same period by his former uncle Charles Ephrussi, also living in Paris. I immediately wondered how that went then, the scarce good and those fanatical collectors.

Both are still intact, one collection in London and the other at the place where it came together, to be visited by us on Saturday mornings between 11.30 and 12.30 after registration via this address: resa@guimet.fr

‘La boucle est bouclée’, the circle is round. Galerie Jean Brolly showed the first major work I made in Paris, L’épicerie du monde, at the new Bienvenue artfair.
It hung – just like the work in Amsterdam in the Westergasfabriek – in a spacious, central location immediately upon entry.

I have seen so many fantastic exhibitions in the two weeks that I stayed in Paris that I decided to continue my blog for a while. To share it a bit. From solutions to the pedestal problem to tapestries about the Brexit, from a carefully reconstructed Marseille apartment to the first outsider artist of the seventeenth century.

That the last piece I made in Paris could be shown right away in Amsterdam at the Art on Paper fair, was a great opportunity. In a generous, central stand of Witteveen Visual Arts, flanked by a work I made in 2014, in which I quoted Matisse for the first time.

Slightly further away, Gallery Rob de Vries showed pencil drawings from Florette Dijkstra, who always intrigue me.
She has been portraying artists’ workspaces for many years, which could be a good subject for an exhibition.

Harvest

It’s done. Half a year Paris, made possible by the Mondriaan Fund and Mrs Wilma Holsboer, who after a frugal life in 1996 left her inheritance of 300.000 guilders at the Institut Néerlandais, which bought ‘the right to use for a century’, of this fantastic studio in the Cité.Paris, was in snow when I arrived, with a Seine so high that there was nowhere a quay to be seen. The same quay that is now called ‘Paris Plage’, with beach chairs, swings, pinball machines, coffee shops and a trumpet player. Paris that was much nicer to live in than I thought, with my koga miyata from the bicycle repair shop in the village where I grew up.The metropolis with allure, with two great opera houses where I saw five operas, with a Philharmonie, with hundreds of exhibitions, the most beautiful museums, which you can never see all. With some very nice people; many artists, a singer, a curator / critic / tour leader, lovers of art, a gallery owner and his assistant, shopkeepers, a receptionist and an author and his wife.With market stalls where customers next to you in line recommend the delicious goods . And there was a grocery store that every Parisian who loves cooking knows because there you still find what you can not get anywhere else. The shop became my muse on the second day of my stay here. Because of the care with which they present their wares. Where jars change position on the shelves, the multicolored composition constantly differs.I have portrayed this miraculous shop in 20 separate parts, which will be shown as a total, but sold individually. With a catalog, published by the gallery.

‘L’épicerie du Monde’ can be seen at the art fair ‘Bienvenue’ with
Galerie Jean Brolly, in the exhibition space of Cité Internationale des Arts,
from 15 to 27 October. Opening Monday, October 15 at 6 pm.

And then there was Matisse, whom I got to know better here. I wanted to make a work about him, with which I returned to the interior. A composite work, like my last one for the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital in Amsterdam. A collage of different parts of his workshops; the bed to which he had been confined the last years of his life, the long stick on which the crayon was attached, the philodendron that inspired him for years in the cut-outs. The model of the chapel in Vence, the statue ‘The slave’ that he made in 1903, when he was still under the influence of Rodin. The books in the bedside table refer to his heroes, of which Renoir, Courbet and Cezanne were the most important. The vases from his still lifes, always perceived differently and the cage for his pigeons, of which he had a hundred at one point.
I found a beautiful book in which all the cuttings that had been left on the floor were found after his death. In the book, assistants-from-then tell how they painted the gouache sheets in the morning. One did that mainly transparent, the other opaque in the paint. They told about his scissors, who were like brushes to him and were cherished. He had twelve, very small tailor-scissors for the precise work and large textile scissors for the rough cuttings.
In the book I saw a (color) photo that I never saw before; Matisse in front of a wall full of paper-sheet, ready to be cut. And I just found a recent acquisition at Centre Pompidou; the first study for the stained-glass window for the chapel in Vence, Jérusalem Céleste, with the use sheets as I painted them a week ago and gave a place in this work as the final step.

‘Twelve Scissors’ will be shown at the stand of Witteveen Visual Art, in the ‘Art on Paper’ fair in the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, from 13 to 16 September.
Opening Thursday, September 13 at 17:00.